Universal Pictures, via Getty ImagesMs. Durbin with Franchot Tone in "His Butler's Sister" (1943).Edna Mae Durbin was born on Dec. 4, 1921, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and
grew up in Southern California, where she studied singing. She was
discovered by an MGM casting director searching Los Angeles singing
schools for someone to portray the opera star Ernestine Schumann-Heink
as a child.
Signed by the studio at 13, Ms. Durbin, who already possessed a mature coloratura soprano, soon appeared in a one-reel short,
“Every Sunday,” with another recently signed 13-year-old, Judy Garland, who sang swing while Ms. Durbin sang classical music.
Her MGM career ended suddenly, however, when Schumann-Heink, who was to
play herself as an adult in the movie about her life, died at 75 and the
studio did not pick up Ms. Durbin’s option. Shortly afterward she moved
to Universal, shepherded there by Rufus Le Maire, a former MGM
executive who had switched his allegiance to the rival studio.
Ms. Durbin was quickly handed to Joe Pasternak, who produced her first
10 movies, and to Henry Koster, who directed six of them: “Three Smart
Girls,” “One Hundred Men and a Girl,”
“Three Smart Girls Grow Up,” “First Love,” “Spring Parade” and
“It Started With Eve.”In his autobiography, “Easy the Hard Way,” Mr. Pasternak — who would
eventually move to MGM and build the careers of two other coloratura
sopranos, Kathryn Grayson and Jane Powell — said that stardom was always
“a matter of chemistry between the public and the player” and that no
one could take credit for discovering Deanna Durbin.
“You can’t hide that kind of light under a bushel,” he wrote. “You just can’t, even if you try.”
Ms. Durbin, who was originally to have ninth billing in “Three Smart
Girls,” became the movie’s star when studio executives saw the first
rushes. About the same time, in 1936, she began singing on Eddie
Cantor’s popular weekly radio program.
In 1938 there was a nationwide search to choose the young man who would
give Ms. Durbin her first screen kiss in the movie “First Love.” (Robert
Stack was the actor chosen.) She was given a special miniature 1938
Academy Award for her “significant contribution in bringing to the
screen the spirit and personification of youth.”
In movie after movie Ms. Durbin’s character found a way to help the
struggling grown-ups in her life: reuniting her divorced parents,
persuading the conductor Leopold Stokowski to help her out-of-work
musician father, cajoling a stranger into becoming her father for a day.
Many of the films were Depression fairy tales in which Ms. Durbin won
over or defeated silly rich people with the help of butlers, cooks and
chauffeurs, who often risked their jobs to aid her.
After moving to France in 1949 and settling outside Paris in the village
of Neauphle-le-Château, Ms. Durbin devoted most of her time to keeping
her home, cooking and raising her children. In addition to Peter, her
son from her marriage to Mr. David, Ms. Durbin had a daughter, Jessica,
from her second marriage. Mr. David died in 1999, a few months before
their 50th wedding anniversary.
Mr. David once said that he and Ms. Durbin had made a deal that he would
protect her “from spiders, mosquitoes and reporters.”
Ms. Durbin, who gave almost no interviews after she left Hollywood, did
send reporters a letter in 1958 that read in part: “I was a typical
13-year-old American girl. The character I was forced into had little or
nothing in common with myself — or with other youth of my generation,
for that matter. I could never believe that my contemporaries were my
fans. They may have been impressed with my ‘success.’ but my fans were
the parents, many of whom could not cope with their own youngsters. They
sort of adopted me as their ‘perfect’ daughter.”
In the letter, which was excerpted in some newspapers, she also wrote:
“I was never happy making pictures. I’ve gained weight. I do my own
shopping, bring up my two children and sing an hour every day.”
